Auckland Zoo has said goodbye to one of its best known residents. Rukiya, the matriarch of the zoo’s giraffe herd, was euthanised on Friday after her keepers and vets decided her age had caught up with her. She was 25, which sits at the upper end of what giraffes usually live to, and she had spent almost her entire life in Auckland.
Rukiya arrived from Wellington Zoo not long after her first birthday and grew into the anchor of the Auckland herd. Over the years she gave birth to five calves, and four of those went on to have young of their own at the zoo, which made her a quietly important part of the breeding effort that keeps giraffes in Australasian collections. For many families who have walked the giraffe boardwalk over the past two decades, she was simply the tall one who was always there.
The decision to put her down came after a long stretch of close monitoring. Auckland Zoo veterinary services manager Dr James Chatterton said Rukiya had become a geriatric animal whose health the team had been watching carefully in recent years. “While we have been able to keep Rukiya comfortable with medication and provide some short-term relief, ultimately, it’s not possible to reverse age-related conditions such as osteoarthritis,” he said, in comments reported by RNZ.
Osteoarthritis is a wearing away of the cushioning in the joints, and in an animal the size of a giraffe it becomes a serious welfare problem. A grown giraffe carries a lot of weight on long legs, and once the joints stiffen and become painful there is no way back. Chatterton framed the call as part of the job rather than a failure of care. He said that as animal healthcare professionals the team has “a responsibility to make compassionate and timely evidenced-based welfare decisions that are in the best interests of the animals in our care.”
That responsibility is one of the harder parts of running a modern zoo. Better veterinary care and steady feeding mean animals in good collections often live longer than they would in the wild, and that success brings its own dilemma. Keepers end up managing old age, and eventually they have to decide when comfort can no longer be maintained. It is a decision that gets made with the animal in front of them rather than on a calendar, and for Rukiya that point arrived on Friday.
Ungulates team leader Michael Hepher, who works with the zoo’s hoofed animals, spoke about what she meant to the people around her. He described Rukiya as an exceptional animal in many ways and said “she was loved not only by zoo staff and volunteers, but by our wider community, many of whom have grown up and been able to connect with her over so many years.” Staff who feed and care for an animal every day for more than two decades form a real bond, and the loss lands on them first.
Rukiya’s history at the zoo was not free of heartbreak either. In 2018 she gave birth to a calf that the zoo was unable to save despite what keepers described at the time as her being an attentive and capable mother. The zoo’s own account of that loss noted she had already delivered several healthy calves before it, and that she did everything she could for the newborn. Those ups and downs are part of why long-serving keepers grow so attached to individual animals.
Her death also touches something bigger than one herd in Auckland. Giraffes are not doing as well in the wild as their familiar, almost cartoonish image suggests. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the giraffe as vulnerable, with numbers across Africa falling over recent decades because of habitat loss, poaching and the pressures of a growing human population. Conservationists have sometimes called it a silent extinction, because the decline has happened without the public alarm that surrounds animals like elephants or rhinos.
That is the backdrop to why zoos run coordinated breeding programmes. Auckland Zoo takes part in the Australasian regional programme for giraffes, which manages matings across a number of institutions so the captive population stays genetically healthy and does not become too closely related. Rukiya’s five calves, and the grandcalves that followed, were a direct contribution to that shared effort. A single well-bred female with a good breeding record is worth a great deal to a small regional population, which is part of why her keepers described her role as so significant.
For visitors, the practical question is what happens next at the giraffe enclosure. Zoos generally keep giraffes in a small social group, and the loss of an older female changes the shape of the herd left behind. Auckland Zoo has not signalled any immediate change to public access, and its giraffes remain one of the most popular sights at the Western Springs site. The zoo has asked people to remember Rukiya rather than dwell on her passing, and plenty of Aucklanders who grew up visiting her will do exactly that.
Animal deaths at zoos always draw a mix of grief and hard questions about keeping large wild animals in captivity at all. Supporters argue that good zoos now earn their place through conservation breeding, research and the simple work of connecting city children with animals they would otherwise never meet. Rukiya, over 24 years in Auckland, did all three. Her keepers will feel the gap in the herd, and so will the families who counted on seeing her on a day out.
Did you visit Rukiya at Auckland Zoo over the years, or do you have a view on how zoos should handle the care of their oldest animals? Share your memories and your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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